Surveys can provide valuable insights into your customer base, but if they are too long or complicated they can deter customers and have useless results,  according to Steve Deist in Capturing the Power of Customer Surveys.

“When the marketing group puts together the annual customer survey, every other department sees it as their only opportunity to insert their pet questions,” Deist says.

A good survey should focus on answering one or two specific strategic questions. Keeping questions to one sentence and avoiding multiple pages to click through can also keep the experience positive for customers.

“Long surveys are self-defeating,” Deist says. “They kill response rates and produce unreliable data. By the third page, respondents are mindlessly clicking boxes so they can get back to work. It’s 2017; we all have the attention span of a gnat.”

Learn more about creating effective surveys in Capturing the Power of Customer Surveys.